① My wonderful friend bbbsg was the subject of an article in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Here’s the article. It’s mostly about her decision to have her foot amputated (a prosthesis would give her more mobility and less pain), but it fits with the subject of this post because it also talks about her skills in “circus arts” — namely silks, although the article doesn’t say so. (I am really bummed I didn’t get a paper copy yesterday; I meant to, but I forgot. The physical edition has a picture of her on the silks. Anybody have a spare copy of Monday’s Globe?)

② At sunspiral and roozle’s Beginning of Summer party (awesome, as they always are), I took a bunch of photos of firespinning. Here they are, on Flickr. (If you’re in them and would like to be credited, let me know which photos — I could only recognize two and maybe three people in them — and how you’d like me to credit you. If you’re in some of them and would like them removed or Friends-and-Family locked, of course, just let me know!)

For those of you who haven’t seen this in person, while it’s pretty gorgeous in photos, the trails seem very different in person (they don’t start and end abruptly the way they do in photos, of course, but are part of one long trail from the flame lighting to the flame going out), and because the eye can’t catch the subtle detail and texture in the flame the way the camera can. So while I love firespinning photos, they feel more like art than like representation to me. Here’s an example: